Special report:

Pranks: a competition

From Hermes to bonsai kittens

What makes a jape great?

AS A pupil at a minor English boarding school, one of the rituals your correspondent dreaded most was morning chapel: 600 boys and a dozen berobed “masters” crammed into a cold, dim chamber for ten minutes of dreary hymns and prayers. Until, that is, one morning, the solemn atmosphere was shattered by an unforgettable act of comic bravado. Seconds after the headmaster—known as the Head Horse on account of his equine features—took his seat, a giant white sheet rolled down over the arched entrance. On it was a caricature of a grinning horse wearing a mortar-board. Lord, how we laughed.

The perpetrators' identities did not stay secret for long—what schoolboy could resist boasting of such a jape? The rolled-up sheet had been held in place by thread that was tied to the switch for the headmaster's reading light so tautly that when he turned it on, the thread snapped and the caricature was unfurled. The Head Horse had been forced to humiliate himself. Even he had to admit it was ingenious.

Abbie Hoffman, a 1960s radical-cum-trickster, said most pranks fell into one of three categories: “good” pranks were amusingly satirical, “bad” ones gratuitously vindictive, and “neutral” ones surreal and soft on the victim (if there was one). An example of the first is the time Mr Hoffman and his fellow “Yippies” showered the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills in 1967, thereby managing to stop the tickertape for six minutes while traders scrambled to pick up the notes. For a taste of the second, go to any college fraternity initiation. Examples of the third are many and delicious. A master of the art in the early 20th century was Horace de Vere Cole, an inveterate British prankster. Cole bore a striking resemblance to the then leader of the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald, and one of his favourite japes was to appear at Labour rallies posing as MacDonald, stride on stage to rapturous applause, and denounce everything the party stood for.

Priceless or puerile? There's the rub, for one man's brilliant prank is another's mindless stunt. Most would agree that the best pranks offer more than just deception, mischievousness or ridicule, and that much of the genre dished up on television now—the mutant progeny of shows like “Candid Camera”—falls well short of the mark. But what is that special ingredient? Elaborateness or simplicity? Satirical bite or surrealism? Irony or bluntness? Even dictionaries seem unsure how to define “prank” (orig. unk.): it is, by turns, a malicious trick, a conjuring act performed to deceive or surprise, a mischievous frolic, and more.

Homeric humour

If the prank is one of the more elusive arrows in the comedic quiver, it is also one of the oldest. The Homeric world is full of them. Hermes, for instance, was “full of tricks—a bringer of dreams”. He played his first when only a day old, stealing a herd of cattle belonging to his brother, Apollo, and driving them into a cave backwards to suggest that they had left instead of entered. So beguiling were his tricks that Zeus “laughed out loud to see his mischievous child”.

Pranks were a feature of ancient seasonal festivals. During Saturnalia, a Roman winter celebration, participants would dance, drink and play jokes on each other; slaves pretended to rule their masters, and a mock king, the Lord of Misrule, reigned for a day. Later, court jesters took advantage of a similar inversion of roles, playing tricks on kings and courtiers. Medieval magicians and tricksters had their own bible, the 14th century “Secretum Philosophorum” (which taught, for instance, how to turn water into wine by soaking pieces of bread in dark wine, drying them in the sun, and dropping them into the jug when no one was looking).

The best pranks have always blurred the lines between legality and illegality, good and bad taste, right and wrong conduct. Festivals like Saturnalia appeared to undermine the social order, but paradoxically helped to reaffirm it, by allowing people to act out their frustrations in a harmless way. The nearest thing to this today is April Fool's Day—“the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year,” as Mark Twain gently put it—though the best April 1st jokes tend to be media hoaxes, rather than traditional pranks. A classic of the genre is a 1957 BBC “documentary” on Swiss spaghetti farmers. Many British viewers asked where they could buy pasta trees.

Some of the best April Fool's stunts are those that send up national characteristics. To prove the point that Germans who break even minor rules struggle with their guilt, a few years back a newspaper in Tübingen announced a new experiment by the traffic authorities. Local drivers who had knowingly exceeded the speed limit in recent days were to turn themselves in, pay a fine and take lessons in safe driving. More than 60 sinners obliged.

Sportive students

For the most impressively elaborate pranks, however, go to a university campus. Take thousands of bright young things with too much time on their hands, itching to achieve, amuse and misbehave, and splendid acts of delinquency will follow.

The best colleges strive to out-prank one another. Students at Yale scored a big victory during last year's football match against Harvard when they passed out pieces of paper to thousands of fans on the Harvard side of the stadium. The fans were told that, when held up, the bits would spell “Go Harvard”. In fact they spelled something else (see photo that opened this article).

At Harvard's neighbour, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “hacks”, as the MIT crowd calls them, are more serious. So serious, in fact, that in 2003 the institute's best hacks were assembled in a 178-page book, “Nightwork”. The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across. Mr Peterson's book includes an 11-point code for pranksters: leave no damage, do not steal, do not drop things off a building without a ground crew, and so on. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, at least, student pranks have become an establishment activity.

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But the scene of what many consider the best-ever engineering prank was that other academic Cambridge, in England, where, one morning in 1958, the town awoke to see an Austin Seven van on top of the Senate House building. After weeks of preparation, a group of mechanical-sciences undergraduates had pushed the van, wheelbarrow-like, minus its doors and back wheels, into place, then hoisted it using a derrick of five 24-foot scaffolding poles, 250 feet of steel wire, 200 feet of hemp rope, pulley blocks and hooks, planks, and even sacking to protect the building. Once the vehicle had been dragged to the top of the sloping roof, the doors and wheels were re-fitted.

The world's media rightly applauded the prank. It was breathtakingly ambitious, requiring both brains and brawn in prodigious quantities; the planning was meticulous (the dozen or so students involved were split into sub-teams, including one comprising two pretty females to distract curious passers-by); and it created a spectacularly surreal sight that could be seen across town. The perpetrators were particularly pleased that what took them under three hours to do took the Civil Defence Force four days to undo. The dean of the college from which the prank was launched sent the ringleader a case of champagne.

While students generally prank for fun or pride, another breed does it for political ends. Anti-corporate pranking took off in the 1960s, as giant corporations began to be feared as much as nuclear weapons. Hoffman's Yippies blazed the trail, engaging in playful political theatre against big business as well as politicians. Their modern-day heirs are the likes of RTMARK and the Yes Men. RTMARK is a sort of online brokerage bringing together “investors” who give time and money for anti-corporate stunts. The Yes Men fancy themselves as satirical guerrillas. A favoured tactic is to pose as spokesmen for big companies: one Yes Man infiltrated a banking conference, at which he unveiled an “Acceptable Risk Calculator” that helped companies to work out the point at which deaths linked to their products began cutting into their profits. Several delegates asked for more information.

Another popular target of such groups is the media. To many, the master media-hoaxer is Alan Abel, who over the years has passed himself off as Howard Hughes, faked his own death (the New York Times published an obituary) and, when Idi Amin was on the run from Uganda, lured the press into covering a wedding ceremony in which the former dictator apparently married an American woman to secure citizenship. Mr Abel's tip: strut your stuff on Sundays, when the gullible, junior reporters are on duty.

To some, pranking is a bit like drugs—good fun when you're young, but not something respectable adults do. Mr Abel, now in his 70s, belongs to a rare breed that considers it a lifetime's work. That his like are rare is perhaps for the best. When serious grown-ups try their hand at pranks, the result is often ham-fisted.

Corporate bosses are a case in point. In the go-go 1990s, larks became de rigueur in the executive suite. There has been less of this since boom turned to bust, though at a few firms, such as Sun Microsystems, “pranking the boss” is still ingrained. “It encourages employees to be innovative,” a Sun spokeswoman earnestly explains. Occasionally, a big corporation gets it just right. In 1996, Taco Bell Corporation of America announced it had bought the Liberty Bell from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Cue outrage across the country.

These days, the medium of choice for many tricksters is the internet. Spoof websites and bogus e-mails proliferate, and a cottage industry offers downloadable prank phone calls and the like. While the web has democratised the art, it has diluted it. Most of the stuff is crude—the online equivalent of the whoopee cushion. The Prank Institute, an online community “dedicated to the pranking sciences”, has logged tens of thousands of decidedly variable quality. A glorious exception is the site that offers “bonsai kittens”, reared in small jars, which outrages animal-lovers.

Ranking the pranking

Perhaps it was ever thus: many having a go, few producing anything genuinely funny and admirable. After all, nobody likes to think they have no jocular streak. Even Adolf Hitler claimed to have been a prankster in his youth. If so, he lost it spectacularly.

With that warning in mind, we invite readers to nominate their contender for the finest prank in history, explaining in 750 words why it deserves the title, to reach us by January 20th. The three best entries will be announced in February and published on Economist.com. Entries, please, to pranks@economist.com.